Friday, June 25, 2010

Tele-Historicism (or, Lady Gaga on the Telephone)

[What hath Lady Gaga to do with Ingeld? To answer Alcuin's age old question ... and to pose a series of even more interesting queeries about gender, identity and temporality -- we offer you a special treat: an invigorating guest post from longtime ITM friend MOR. Enjoy! -- JJC]

Cycles of Salience

Valerie Traub has in an important recent article, “The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography”, attempted to “think through some of the larger methodological issues that currently face the field of lesbian history.”[i] She argues that “the future of this field depends on reconceptualizing some of the issues that have thus far informed our construction of the past” (124). Her essay is motivated by what she describes as the need to mediate between two differing approaches to the construction of the past, which she terms continuist and alteritist. She explains the two divergent historical methods in the following fashion: “scholars whose historical accounts take a continuist form have tended to emphasize a similarity between past and present concepts of sexual understanding; those who instead highlight historical difference or alterity (as it is termed by literary scholars) have tended to emphasize problems of anachronism, changing terminologies and typologies, and resistance to teleology” (124). Traub is convinced that both the continuist and alteritist positions have “outlived” their “utility” (124). In their place, and the same set of arguments could be used to talk about the essentialist/constructivist and acts versus identities debates, Traub suggests we look for what she calls “cycles of salience”. She explains that what she calls “the present future of lesbian historiography-by which I mean those methods that might enable us to imagine a future historicist practice—necessitates analyzing recurring patterns in the identification, social statuses, behaviours, and meanings of women who erotically desired other women across large spans of time”(125). “Doing so” she believes “could result in a new methodological paradigm for lesbian history” (125).

A newly re-tuned tele-historical Lesbian Studies would take up precisely this methodological challenge as laid down by Traub[ii]. This reinvigorated Lesbian Studies would be alert to questions of historicity, temporality and the variegated methods which queer theory draws on to reshape the ways we do history, the history of sexuality in particular, without of course completely displacing the twin traps of transhistoricism and constructivism and by appealing to Traub’s notion of “recurrent explanatory logics” (126). If the continuist method insists that the lesbian is a transhistorical category and the alteritist method avows that the lesbian doesn’t carry the same meanings (since lesbian as a category didn’t exist as a possibility prior to its historical invention), then a tele-historical lesbian historiography would follow Traub in refusing to privilege the twin emphases on naming and identity. This cross-temporal lesbian studies, which crosses and blurs temporal boundaries and is both backward gazing and forward gazing , creates a mutually transformational conversation between historicized lesbian/Sapphic histories and under (or even un-) historicized presentist, postmodern lesbian studies and this concerted attempt to straddle temporal periods will ensure the “curious persistence”[iii] of lesbian studies into the future as well as its curious persistence into the past, or what Traub, in an incredibly useful formulation, calls the “the present future of lesbian historiography”. This cross-temporal approach would re-draw the lines we work with, problematizing notions of linear history and discrete historical periods or epochs, and complicating the dating of the so-called invention of homosexuality, the most tenacious example of which has been the suggestion made by Michel Foucault that the birth of the homosexual occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Getting postmedieval

Bringing sapphism and lesbianism into productive conjunction highlights the ways in which lesbian history is discontinuous, heterogeneous and plural, how lesbian temporalities are non-sequential and multiple, and how bringing modern critical modes to bear on the past, surfaces issues around identity, naming, subjectivity, sexuality, representation, friendship, ethics, and politics, to name just a few. The mission statement for the inaugural issue of the journal postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies[iv] is worth paraphrasing (where the editors, Eileen Joy and Craig Dionne talk about the post/human I substitute the lesbian) since the aim of this crucially important and socially interventionist new publication is to examine “possible productive intersections (of any type) between studies in earlier historical periods and ongoing discourses” on the lesbian and contemporary discourses on the lesbian, to think about “how certain aspects and discourses of premodern historical periods might problematize the assumptions” of a lesbian studies that “considers itself to be either thoroughly modern or somehow outside of a ‘deeper’ history”, and, finally, to excavate the “ways in which the history and culture of premodernity might help us to address and perhaps begin to adjudicate some of the troubling questions raised by contemporary discourses on” the lesbian[v]. We might say then, that a postmedieval tele-lesbian historiography participates in a lesbian studies which is both before and afterThe Lesbian Postmodern, the title of Laura Doan’s important 1994 collection, which set out to “test the limits (of epistemology, of identity, of subjectivity, of disciplinarity) and problematize and undermine polarities (such as political efficacy and theoretical formulation, or essentialism and constructivism, or modernism and postmodernism [I would add premodernism], or margin and center [I would add canonical and non-canonical]”[vi].

Traub hypothesizes, as we have already glimpsed, that the “recurrent explanatory logics” she conceptualizes “seem to underlie the organization, and reorganization of women’s erotic life” (126). She goes on to say this: “sometimes these preoccupations arise as repeated expressions of identical concerns; sometimes they emerge under an altered guise. As endemic features of erotic discourse, these logics and definitions, as well as the ideological faultlines they subtend, not only contribute to the existence of historically specific figures and typologies, but also ensures correspondences across time” (126, my emphasis). As I re-read Traub’s essay (and it repays multiple readings so rich and thought-provoking are its hypotheses and suggested rubrics) the word faultlines (one we associate with the work of Alan Sinfield[vii]) pressed itself upon me and I wondered if we might learn from another great theorist of faults on the line, not Avital Ronell[viii], but Lady Gaga, about the configurations of female-female desire, past and present.

Gaga on the Line

Lady Gaga is someone we might not think of as out of place in the pages of Traub’s essay which tentatively proposes the tribade (Gaga is widely rumoured to possess a penis), the invert (Gaga’s bodily morphology and gender inversion are a constant source of speculation) and the romantic friend (Gaga’s videos with Beyoncé consistently make intertextual reference to earlier models of romantic friendship, most notably Thelma and Louise as they ride off in their “pussy wagon”) as “transhistorical figures of lesbian history” (132). Traub is at pains to point out that the explanatory “meta-logics” (133) she proposes don’t all focus as “axes of social definition” but may provide points of “access to them, as well as a better understanding of the moments they accrue social significance” (133), and reading her list of “substantive themes” alongside Gaga’s video for Telephone (Interscope Records, 2010)[ix] provides several lines of communication between Traub’s historical methodology and Gaga’s epic narrative.

Traub’s long list includes “the relationship between erotic acts and erotic identities (Gaga’s video contains a passionate kiss between Gaga and a butch lesbian); the quest for causes of erotic desire in the physical body” (Gaga’s penis or lack of a penis is a source of fascination for the guards in the semi-nude female prison “for bitches” in which she is incarcerated); the status accorded to the genitals in defining sexual acts (this status intersects with technicity in the video since the telephone functions as a prosthetic penis or lesbian phallus)[x]; the relationships of love, intimacy and friendship to eroticism, including the defensive separation of sex from friendship (while Gaga and Beyoncé never explicitly have sex the relationship between Gaga and her “honey bee” is clearly coded as a romantic friendship); the fine line between virtue and transgression, orderly and disorderly homoeroticism; the relationship of eroticism to gender deviance and conformity (Gaga’s female homoeroticism is clearly disorderly, perhaps explaining why she is imprisoned at the beginning of the video); the symbolic and social functions of gendered clothing (Gaga’s fishnet tights play an important role as we shall see shortly, but the other frontal crotch shots tell a different story about her bodily morphology); the relevance of age, class/status, and ethnic/racial hierarchies to erotic relations (Gaga’s bad romance with Beyoncé is an inter-racial one); the relationship of homoeroticism to homosociality (the prison dance sequences and the kiss in the yard are clear instances, to more than paraphrase Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, of the potential crossing of the line which should remain unbroken between homoeroticism and homosociality); the role of gender-segregated spaces, including ... criminal ... institutions (the prison is of course a space we more readily associate with male homoeroticism). And the list could go on.

But, perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from Gaga about lesbian historical methodologies is that we ought not to get ourselves so hung up on issues and questions of naming, identity, or acts[xii]. In a particularly salient scene near the beginning of the video two scantily clad female guards escort Gaga to her cell. Once inside they strip her of her prison clothes so that she is left wearing only a pair of fishnet tights. She turns to face the camera and where we expect to see a penis or a vagina all we get to see is a blurred frontal crotch-shot. What this teaches us is that we need to stop calling up, or only calling up, figures like the tribade (with her enlarged clitoris) when we are looking for lesbians in the past; and we need to stop looking, or only looking for genital acts and/or phallic substitutes (dildos or other mechanical devices) as proof in our lesbian cryptological projects[xiii]. What Gaga shows us is that the lines between homosociality, friendship, genitality and eroticism, continually cross and tangle. And what Traub also demonstrates is that approaches and temporal lines continually cut across one another, so many heres, nows, thens. Traub echoes Beyoncé’s stuttering “eh ... eh ... eh...” by advocating a “proliferating and contestatory syntax of ‘and, but, and, but’” (138). Her wonderfully inspiring conclusion is worth reiterating at length since it describes what a re-charted lesbian historiography ought to try to do:

It is, admittedly, difficult to imagine how such a multifaceted dialogue might happen or take place. Given the highly periodized institutional conditions within which we pursue our scholarly work, and given, as well, the mandate to examine such an enormous temporal and spatial expanse, its creation clearly is not the task of any one scholar. Such a complex act of creation would require a collective conversation, or rather, many conversations imbued with multiple voices, each of them engaged in a proliferating and contestatory syntax of ‘and, but, and, but’. This collaboration, born of a common purpose, would not erase friction, but embrace it and use it. I imagine such voices and the histories they articulate coming together and falling apart, like the fractured images of a rotating kaleidoscope: mimetic and repetitive, but undergoing transformation as each aspect reverberates off others. Such a kaleidoscopic vision of historiography is, no doubt, a utopian dream. But like all dreams, it gestures toward a horizon of possibility, provocatively tilting our angle of vision and providing us with new questions and, perhaps, new ways of answering them” (138).

Gaga’s video ends on a similarly utopic note, a “feeling of forward-dawning futurity”[xiv]with Beyoncé and her driving off toward an imagined horizon of possibility in their “pussy wagon”, as the words “to be continued” blaze across the screen. Tele-lesbian studies doesn’t offer any definitive answers to methodological questions, but rather stages multiple dialogues, collect(ive) calls “imbued with multiple voices”, and a “kaleidoscopic vision” of lesbian historiography. We might, in a more expansive mode, with Lady Gaga, call this new “angle of vision”, this set of conversations, a tele-historicism, one whose call we cannot refuse[xv].

Michael O’Rourke, June 2010.

*This essay has benefitted from multiple conversations with Karin Sellberg, Helen Butcher, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Anna Klosowska, and Eileen Joy about anachronicity, historicism and poly/inter-temporalities and, of course, Lady Gaga. I continue to benefit from their friendship, love and inspiration and I am especially grateful to Jeffrey for allowing me to publish it here at ITM.

[ii] Two recent books, published in the Queer Interventions series, founded by Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke, do take up this challenge. Queer Movie Medievalisms (edited by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, 2009) and Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (edited by Vin Nardizzi, Will Stockton and Stephen Guy-Bray, 2009), each focus on a particular historical period, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance respectively, but bring presentist modes of theoretical enquiry to bear on those earlier moments.

The rationale for and current titles in the series can be accessed here.

[v] Eileen Joy and Craig Dionne, “Before the Trains of Thought have Been Laid Down So Firmly: The Premodern Post/Human”, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 1-2, 2010, p. 6.

[vi] Laura Doan, “Preface” in The Lesbian Postmodern, 1994, p.x). The publication of The Lesbian Premodern: a Historical and Literary Dialogue, edited by Noreen Giffney, Michelle Sauer and Diane Watt, forthcoming in the New Middle Ages series, is eagerly anticipated.

5 comments:

"We might, in a more expansive mode, with Lady Gaga, call this new 'angle of vision', this set of conversations, a tele-historicism, one whose call we cannot refuse."

Perhaps we should not refuse it, but I wonder if a bit of nervousness should accompany our acceptance--nervousness about how this "more expansive mode" continues to repeat old, tired, heteronormative, and hypremasculine narrative structures. The "utopic note" at the conclusion of the Gaga video is set up, in part, by Gaga committing mass murder at a diner--portrayed as an act of chivalry. Not only is Beyonce's abusive boyfriend wasted, but everyone else is as well--and the camera indulges the audience by panning across the lifeless corpses left in the wake of Gaga's good fun. What are we to make of this sacrifice of innocents? Is this how utopias are built? I'm not so sure. Gaga has been a very, very, bad, bad girl.

Thanks so much, Michael, for this wonderful provocation to thought, which I am also re-reading with Marty's cautionary comments in mind. First, as regards Traub's desire for a cross-temporal "present future" lesbian historiography, I am reminded of both Sara Ahmed's call in the conclusion of "Queer Phenomenology" for a "looking back" that "keeps open the possibility of going astray" which "also means an openness to the future, as the imperfect translation of what is behind us" as well as Elizabeth Freeman's idea of "being bound" as both being *stuck* in time while also always *going* somewhere [and where "queer relations always complexly exceed the present"]. I might slightly revise the idea of a "present future" into a "pastpresent future," whereby modernity is seen as a becoming-something else while still remaining in “undead” traction with older social, cultural, political, psychic, etc. formations. The present moment, in ANY time, is therefore partly the sum of certain movements of what Cary Howie calls "traherence," in which nothing really “gets free of what it ostensibly emerges from” and every Now is simultaneously a “not yet” and a “then.” The "futural," as it were [and I prefer "futural" over "future," simply because it denotes the future as something always becoming in the present versus an actual site/place/time one eventually arrives to or that "comes" whether or not we are actually there to see it], is both something old and something new, as it were, and I think it's also a good idea to take some of Madhavi Menon's and Jonathan Goldberg's words to heart [from their PMLA essay on "Queering History"] regarding all the ways in which merely looking forward or backward, being continuist or alteritist or anything that departs from those modalities while still depending on them as a baseline of departure, still keeps us locked into "doing history" in ways that never really break free of linear temporalities. Maybe rethinking temporality & time also means somehow thinking *outside* of it [?], but this is, admittedly, difficult.

As regards Traub's desire for a critical discourse that would have a "but, and, but, and, etc." cadence, where [I assume] we include & welcome both friction/debate as well as the accretive/additive/pluralist impulse, I was reminded also of Cary's commentary in his book "Claustrophilia" on anaphora--"when one and the same word [in this case, Julian of Norwich's "and"] forms successive beginnings for phrases expressing like and different ideas." Maybe it's just me, but I like the idea of an accretive "and and and and" discourse in which there is both critical plenitude as well as a standing *beyond*. And why get "hung up" [to borrow from MOR] about "but, and, but, and," "either/or," "both/and," etc., because all of these tropes for critical maneuvers, or a historiographical practice, or whathaveyou, are obviously all limiting in *some* fashion, in the same way that the very radical gestures of Lady Gaga's video still lapse, in certain crucial moments, into the very heteronormative and hypermasculine narrative structures Marty refers to. And I, for one, could do without the violence of the video which, in some respects, is just . . . silly. [I mean, ALL music videos ate juvenile to a certain extent.] But I very much want to embrace here MOR's call for a collective historiographical enterprise, one that would dispense [IMMEDIATELY] with the idea that any one scholar could do the kind of "present future" lesbian studies work called for, in just one example, by Traub, and that would at least consider the tele-historicism sketched here by MOR as, as I take it, a practice of, in the words of Julian Yates in his essay for the inaugural issue of "postmedieval," remaining open to listening for "strong form[s] of writing that aim to install new forms of inscription" and also to the [historical] agencies of error, errancy, and disorder.

if your utopia involves sacrifice, either of self or others, or even of history [examples: Khmer Rouge, Taliban, etc.], it never begins OR ends well.

It's interesting to me how images of death/destruction/rage are always more attractive than images of natality/construction, whether in avant-garde pop culture or literary criticism. Somehow, death is always more "cool" than love.

Re: Marty's comment, that's why Lady Gaga is the Madonna of the 2010s, just as Madonna was the ... well I don't know my pop icons well enough, but I am sure that Madonna was the "Singer X" of the 1980s, as the copious cultural studies analysis of Madonna must have made clear way back when. In other words, along with the Madonna/Gaga desire to shock and push boundaries also comes a slipstream of clichés, historical detritus, all kinds of images and objects that aren't so much provocative as (for many) a little boring, a little predictable. Is the "Pussy Wagon" in the Telephone video a fresh idea, a clever wink to its source (Tarantino's Kill Bill vol. I), or a lazy "let's cram it as much as possible in there" detail? All those things. As MOR writes, identities tend to resurface in cycles, never quite the same, but never wholly new either. Continuism (event a punctuated continuism) means it's essential to keep the future open while never disconnecting from the past.

MOR's post reminded me, in many good ways, of one of my favorite pieces of his writing, "The Open," his intro to _Queering the Non/Human_. There he writes of objects and materialisms, but if we think about tele-historical identities alongside the agential objects with which they forma network, I think we get at the complexities of the video-landscape MOR is speaking about (and maybe the ways in which tele-historical identities reside not just within singular human bodies: where would Lady Gaga be without her outfits and objects? Even her hair is an object with life of its own ...)

"Even if humanity as finitude, as being-with-toward-death, vulnerably exposes us, we are far from inert as we project ourselves into the future of queered humanity. Karen Brand's notion of 'agential realism' deftly captures this queer phenomenology in so far as bodies intra-act, dynamically and causally. Like Judith Butler's iterability, this agential materialism, which brackets 'things-in-phenomena', allows for new articulations, new configurations, for what Luciana Parsi calls 'affective relations', a community constituted through 'posthumanist performativity' ... Such an ethico-politics (and the queering of the normativities of queer theory itself) depends on what Agamben calls 'the open', a process which does not follow some preconceived teleological programme. Queering the non/human is not a means to an end but a means 'without end.'" (xix)